Comment by _etyf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _etyf | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Far-right terrorism in the US has never really been taken seriously. No one took them seriously.

That's not really true.

Far-right terror was taken very seriously in 1995 after the Oklahoma City bombing. The FBI hired 500 agents specifically to focus on domestic terrorism [0], particularly the then-new militia movement. Virtually every state and federal law enforcement agency established a domestic terror unit. Through continuous effort they'd pretty much quashed the militia movement by 2004, despite the shift of federal resources to the Global War on Terror post-9/11. However, far-right militias surged again in the Obama years [2].

(Much further back, U.S. Grant used the Army to crack down on the Klan [3]. Unfortunately, his successor Rutherford B. Hayes effectively ended Reconstruction and rolled back much of this progress.)

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120210125747/http://news.bbc.c... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110623153230/http://www.rickro... [2] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/03/08/148217754... [3] https://www.historynet.com/grant-takes-klan.htm

I apologize for being imprecise. Far-right terrorism hasn't been taken seriously until a far-right terrorist actually commits violence. Then government is vigilant for a couple of years and goes back to ignoring them.

Far-right terror was taken seriously after the OKC bombing. But the far-right terrorist threat had been steadily increasing for three years at that point. Ruby Ridge and the Waco Siege contributed to a surge in far-right militias and other terrorist groups. It took someone driving a truck bomb and killing hundreds of people (in an attempt to spark a race war) to take far-right terrorism seriously.

They took far right terrorism seriously in the 1870s. They more or less stamped out the (original) KKK while simultaneously giving the south the requisite autonomy to enact Jim Crow. Obviously Jim Crow doesn't square with our modern view but at the time the lack of some systemic way to keep the black people down was a serious grievance that a lot of people had. The government cracked down on the extremists who were starting to get off the porch while simultaneously extending an olive branch to the people who sympathized with them (and throwing black people under the bus in the process).

The same thing happened in the civil rights era. When it looked like things might get serious the .gov caved to the MLK types to prevent the Malcom X types from gaining further sympathy from the masses.

Fast forward to the 1990s and you get the ATF trilogy. Of course the magnitude of the problem was smaller than the KKK so the reaction and adjustments were smaller. On one hand the FBI cracked down on all the extremist groups (cue jokes about how the modern KKK is just a recreation club for FBI agents) but at the same time you'll notice that when the Bundy Ranch rolled around the feds didn't just shoot everyone and botch the thing as they would had they let historical precedent be their guide. Same pattern. Crackdown on the extremists while avoiding pissing off the moderate sympathizers.

Likewise hundreds of cities are reconsidering how they allocate law enforcement and social services resources after the events of this summer while also (recently, like past month) starting to crack down on protests to prevent them from getting fiery. Same pattern.

The overarching theme is pretty clear. The government never takes people's grievances seriously until there's a "real" threat of extremists getting off the porch and causing serious problems with a large body of sympathizers to back them up.

In light of that it'll be interesting to see what if any long term changes come out of the whole capitol thing.

> he government never takes people's grievances seriously until there's a "real" threat of extremists getting off the porch

I haven't noticed any gay-marriage terrorists on their porches, and yet here we are. Women-for-equal-pay have not been observed cleaning and oiling their rifles menacingly, and yet the law was mended in their favor. And I don't think Irish or Jewish terrorism was a problem in the US, but their persecution has ended all the same. You're only looking at things that became explosive, so quite naturally you will not find things that were resolved peacefully and/or timely. They still exist though, in fact they may be dominant.

It's a great comment otherwise, I enjoyed the trip down the memory lane. Looking forward to seeing you again.

> I don’t think Irish or Jewish terrorism was a problem in the US

Both international terrorism (directed at the UK, but sometimes involving direct conflict with the US military) and organized crime-linked terrorism were very big things associated with the Irish in America in the 19th C.

And, on the Jewish side, more recently, Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League was a real thing.

All of the examples you gave are of non-terroristic means of attempting to achieve the goals of a cause, where the groups involved generally lack violent extremists.

GP's point was about how they believe federal law enforcement has reacted to groups that necessarily included violent extremists, as those were the pawns for bargain to offer the opposition while reducing harm to the moderate sympathizers.

Yours appears to be a strawman argument.

Allowing the riots to continue unabated over the summer was a serious mistake. It fed a perception that political violence and intimidation was a viable means to get what you want.

A take like this represents a woeful ignorance of American history.

It seems to me that the unpleasant, but unavoidable conclusion is that a significant fraction of the citizenry is sympathetic to the far right domestic terrorists.

Edit: If you think this is untrue, you have an extremely narrow filter bubble.

In fact, the feds had besieged Ruby Ridge in the first place due to Randy Weaver's far-right connections. They wanted to flip him as an informant on the Aryan Nations [0], a white nationalist group with ties to deadly terror cells like The Order [1]. To this end, they threatened him with the weapons charge that led to the the siege at Ruby Ridge, and ultimately to the shooting deaths of Samuel and Vicky Weaver. So far-right terror was taken seriously pre-OKC, but afterwards it was taken very seriously.

The 2017 PBS documentary "Oklahoma City" was my intro to this subject matter [2]. Excellent film, gripping presentation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge#Development

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Order_(white_supremacist_g...

[2] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/oklahoma-c...

Another way of looking at it is that the federal government entrapped Randy Weaver on weapons charges when he didn’t want to do their leg work, and when he didn’t show up to court, they killed his entire family.

In other words, taking terrorism “seriously” sometimes is done in ways that involve killing innocent people and inciting more blowback in the long run.

Yep, Ruby Ridge and Waco were fiascos which led directly to the bombing of the Murrah Building. McVeigh explicitly called out those events as his motivation for the bombing.

The lessons learned were apparent in the government’s approach to the 2016 wildlife refuge standoff. Rather than dash in guns-blazing, the government simply established a perimeter and waited for the occupiers to run out of Clif Bars. Took the ringleaders into custody with a minimum of force when they attempted to leave. Of the 30-40 occupiers, only one was shot as he reached for his gun. No law enforcement officers were harmed. World of difference compared to Waco, where 4 ATF officers and 82 Branch Davidians were killed.

>and when he didn’t show up to court, they killed his entire family.

This is true, but it misses the nuance that the letter ordering him to attend court had the wrong date listed on it. Makes the assault on the family even more egregious.

But in 2009 Homeland Security published a report on the domestic terror threat. Republicans reacted badly. The agency backtracked and eventually closed the division.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dhs-domestic-terror-warning-ang...

They have not taken this threat seriously. You specifically mentioned militias, but the domestic terror threat is not just militias.

Look at this case for example. He has left many threatening voicemails to congress members over several years, including while under probation, and the FBI just told him to knock it off without arresting him. So he kept doing it. They only finally arrested him after the terrorist attack on the capitol.

>According to the complaint, Capriotti repeatedly called multiple Congressional offices in Washington, D.C., between October 2019 and January 2020 and left “disturbing, anonymous messages” that often included “profanity along with derogatory remarks concerning the race, religion, political affiliation, or physical appearance” of some members of Congress.

>FBI agents located Capriotti and interviewed him last February, according to the complaint, which states that Capriotti admitted making the calls but insisted he was “just f---ing with them” and “didn’t mean any ill will.”

>The agents advised Capriotti to stop making the calls, but phone records showed he continued to do so between February and November 2020. A series of voicemails Capriotti allegedly made to Congressional offices in November and December were then detailed in the complaint.

https://news.wttw.com/2021/01/12/chicago-heights-man-charged...

https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2021/1/12/22227466/feds-a...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com